[zem]

the distinction is important though, because the OP throws in the point about how "if you think the Chinese models have political propaganda baked in, go ahead and remove it, it's open source!". it is not at all obvious to me that having the model weights available will make this sort of retraining easy or even possible, but framing them as "open source" makes the analogy with open source software an easy one to get misled by.

[georgemcbay]

> the distinction is important though

Only to nerds. Of which I am one, so I'm not trying to be personally dismissive here.

But I'd argue the average person only really cares about the legal aspects of duplication (and not their ability to modify things) both when it comes to open source software and open weight LLMs.

> it is not at all obvious to me that having the model weights available will make this sort of retraining easy or even possible

people already both fine-tune and distill from existing models all the time without the original training data or source and having the weights be openly downloadable makes that a much easier process.

[Capricorn2481]

> But I'd argue the average person only really cares about the legal aspects of duplication (and not their ability to modify things) both when it comes to open source software and open weight LLMs.

The average person does not know the term "open source" to begin with, and is 100% not going to run an open source weight model on their computer. If they are, they will call them "free" models. I think the distinction is only going to enter the periphery of nerds.

[georgemcbay]

> The average person does not know the term "open source" to begin with, and is 100% not going to run an open source weight model on their computer.

I agree that the fully average person isn't going to call them "open source models" (or really anything more specific than "AI") but policy makers and the media having this discussion will call them "open source models". And they will be technically incorrect, but it won't matter, the name will stick.

And yeah, it will be quite a long time before average people run open weight models on their computer, but I think a significant amount of them will run hosted open weight models in the nearish future. It won't matter to them that these models are open weight, it will only matter to them that they cost less than Claude or GPT while doing basically the same stuff just about as well.

[Capricorn2481]

I just don't see how policy makers, media, or the average person would find any utility in calling something "open source" over "free." Maybe an actual legal bill will. But in everday speech, everyone will refer to it as "free AI", because it describes the only part they actually care to know about.

Now I am living in a world where "ChatGPT" was being used in every day conversation so I can't underestimate people

[Otterly99]

Open weights models are trainable. However, I would not count it as "easy" as you generally do not have access to the training material, so there is a substantial risk of model drift if you use weight-based retraining.

However, with RLHF you don't need to have access to the original training set to steer a model towards a preferable behavior.